NRMA is a diverse business, and is working towards a single view of the customer, in part to improve customer experiences (eg, through content personalisation) and to enable the commercialisation of anonymised data, NRMA general manager of technology and shared services Vivek Jaiswal told attendees at the Oracle Open World Asia conference held in Singapore this week.

As part of this project, NRMA is developing a standardised, enterprise-grade analytics platform that is secure and well governed, supports self-service and BYO data, reduces repetitive and isolated processes, and makes it simple to publish results in a variety of ways.

Previously, analysts used desktop tools, but that led to governance and consistency issues. NRMA switched to OBIEE (Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition) and Exalytics, which proved “rock solid” but required specialised skills and assistance from IT.

Adopting Oracle’s cloud-based approach means users can do mashups and custom visualisations, use finance reporting objects in their ad hoc analyses, use shared dashboards with a single source of truth, and incorporate their own data sets, said Jaiswal.

And all this happens in a well governed and managed environment that supports diverse users, he said, allowing more data-driven decisions.

But users cannot be left completely to their own devices, he warned. In particular, activities that require large amounts of data to be uploaded to the cloud need to be carefully managed and sized.

Disclosure: The writer attended Oracle OpenWorld Asia as a guest of the company.